Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (3 page)

His daughter was sitting at a desk by a window, writing letters. She told him she was going out shortly to meet an old school friend; they were taking tea together and then going ice-skating. She would be back home by seven thirty and would have dinner with her father as usual.

Werner returned from his walk before dark and finished some scholarly work. At seven thirty Pamela hadn’t returned, but for a while he didn’t worry. She was with friends, she knew Peking, and anyway the skating rink was barely a mile away, in the safety of the Legation Quarter. But when she still wasn’t back an hour later, he started to fret. Why had she not telephoned to say she would be late?

By nine o’clock Werner was becoming seriously concerned, and then infuriated with Pamela for not calling to let him know where she was. His daughter wasn’t always reliable, it was true, and her adolescence hadn’t been easy, but going away to school in Tientsin seemed to have instilled some discipline in her. It was just a shame that things had gone wrong there as well, for different reasons. But she’d been enjoying herself back in Peking for the Christmas holidays, running around the city meeting old friends, dating and ice-skating, and spending time with her father. The two of them were preparing to leave for England in a few months, and so much still remained to be done before their departure.

At ten o’clock Werner could pace his study no longer. He wrapped himself up in his thick gabardine coat, grabbed a kerosene-fuelled storm lantern to light his way in the pitch-black night and headed out to look for her.

Peking was a city that retired early. In winter the streets of the Tartar City were virtually deserted by nine, the shops shut, the street hawkers gone and most sensible people home in bed. Outside the Legation Quarter, streetlights were infrequent, motorized taxis and rickshaws rare. Only the hardiest and most financially needy of the pullers were willing to ferry the night owls home from the bars and nightclubs, and the dens of the Badlands.

At seventy-two, Werner prided himself on his robust constitution. He walked briskly to the Legation Quarter, whose wide streets he knew well, found the house he was looking for, and banged on the door. Pamela’s friend had returned home around eight o’clock, he learned from the girl’s parents, who then tried to reassure him. Pamela must have bumped into an old acquaintance, got chatting and forgotten the time. He should just return home, and she’d surely be there waiting, sorry for the trouble she’d caused.

Werner did go home, but Pamela wasn’t there, nor had she telephoned. The cook, the amah, and the number-one boy were all waiting up, anxious themselves now. Werner sent the cook off to the skating rink, but it was closed, swathed in darkness for the night. He went back to Armour Factory Alley to tell Werner, who headed out to search again, this time taking an electric torch.

Around three a.m., he stopped at the office of Commissioner Thomas, an old acquaintance, but the bureaucrat was off duty and home asleep. Werner left him a note saying that Pamela hadn’t returned home, that he was worried and had gone looking for her. Then he continued to tramp the streets of Peking, from the far east of the city to the far west. He went south as far as the Temple of Heaven, back through the Legation Quarter once more, then north to the Lama Temple, where monks from Tibet congregated. He passed the Confucian Hall of Examinations, where those hoping to enter the Imperial Civil Service had once anxiously awaited the results of their tests, and the Mohammedan Mosque on Cow Street, where Muslims from western China clustered in their communities. Then the Portuguese Church, from whose orphanage Pamela had been adopted. He walked for miles in the darkness.

In the silence, he could hear the kettledrum sound the hours at the Meridian Gate near the Forbidden City, as it had done for centuries. At the gates of courtyard houses, night watchmen struck clappers and cymbals to scare away evil spirits. They did this on the Chinese double hour, which was twice as long as a Western hour, and the cymbal clash lengthened as the hours passed to daylight. Finally Werner returned home, seeking news and needing rest.

As dawn broke, bringing the city slowly back to life on another cold January day, Werner left Armour Factory Alley once more. He was distraught by now, wandering helplessly through eastern Peking again, amid the heavy wooden carts that brought sacks of freshly ground flour to make
bing
, the city’s traditional breakfast of unleavened wheaten cakes. He found himself back at the edge of the Legation Quarter, following the ancient Tartar Wall towards the looming fifty-foot walls of the Fox Tower.

As he neared the tower, thinking to skirt the railway arch where the train line began at its base and head to the Quarter to find Commissioner Thomas, he saw a crowd gathered. Werner rushed forward, propelled by instinct and a sense of doom.

He saw Colonel Han, whom he knew by reputation, and Commissioner Thomas, and the other policemen and photographers, all of them gathered around a corpse. He only needed to see the fair hair and clothing to know who it was.

Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner and his daughter lived in a traditional Chinese courtyard house on a
hutong
in Peking’s Tartar City, just outside the Legation Quarter. No one watching them go about their lives at the start of 1937 would have gained the impression that China was tottering on the edge of a precipice. Their daily routine appeared comfortable and privileged, based more around English than Chinese traditions even though Werner, a widower, had chosen to avoid the overtly European world of the Legation Quarter.

In a city with plenty of old China hands, Werner was perhaps the most notable, having lived and worked in China since the 1880s. As a scholar and a former British consul, his life story was well known. His books were widely read and translated, his complex but highly regarded lectures to the Royal Asiatic Society and the Things Chinese Society well attended. He also wrote articles on Chinese culture, tradition and history for the local newspapers, and his experience and learning might have made him a much-sought-after dinner guest. But he rarely, if ever, accepted, preferring a solitary and scholarly life.

These days Werner had a post at Peking University, where he lectured occasionally, and he also sat as the only foreigner on the Chinese government’s Historiographical Bureau. But mainly he worked from home, at his house at 1 Armour Factory Alley, in the shadow of the Fox Tower, from which it was separated only by an old canal and its population of noisy ducks. Once part of China’s Grand Canal, it was now too silted up to allow the grain barges to transit, and had become a fetid rubbish dump.

Armour Factory Alley, known as Kuei Chia Chang by the Chinese, was close to the old imperial examination halls and a number of papermaking factories, small family businesses that had given the warren of lanes squeezed under the Tartar Wall the name of the Papermakers’ District. The alley was lined with plane trees, and during the day it witnessed a constant procession, beginning with bird fanciers strolling with their covered cages, then street hawkers calling out their services, house staff carrying food back from the markets, people coming and going by taxi and rickshaw, and, finally, late-night sellers of snacks. It was a street that could have existed only in Peking, and one that dated back more than a thousand years.

It had become increasingly common for foreigners to reside outside the Legation Quarter. Landlords had fixed up premises to allow their tenants to live in the Chinese style but with modern conveniences. And a growing number simply couldn’t afford to live in the Quarter, such as the White Russians who’d fled the Soviet Union and subsequently moved down from Harbin or other cities in northern China that had fallen under Japanese occupation. There’d also been a more recent influx of European Jews escaping persecution in Nazi Germany.

Though the bulk of these exiles headed for Shanghai, Peking was also seeing their numbers rise, and many were semi-destitute, forced to live in run-down lodging houses in the sprawling, often malodorous Tartar City, or around the fringes of the Badlands. They found work as doormen, barmen, croupiers, prostitutes and pimps, or survived by begging. The European community and the authorities in the Legation Quarter largely chose to ignore them; these low-life foreigners were considered a threat to white prestige in Peking, and it was hoped they’d move on to Shanghai.

Armour Factory Alley, although in the Tartar City, was certainly no place for poor foreigners. Grey courtyard residences, or
siheyuan
, sat behind ornate gates along both sides of the alley. Werner’s house was built on a traditional north–south axis, with a raised step at the entrance to ward off ghosts. In the courtyard a century-old wisteria climbed the walls, and an ancient poplar tree stood amidst a small rockery. Werner rented the house from its Chinese owner, and although old it had been fitted out with electric lights, a palatial bathroom, steam heating and glass in the windows instead of paper.

The household had a cook, a housemaid who’d been Pamela’s amah when she was younger, and Werner’s number-one boy—a term used in the world of foreigners in China—who was actually a man in his forties. He’d been Werner’s valet for many years and was the chief male servant in the household. There was also a gatekeeper who ensured the security and upkeep of the property, and he too had been with the family for a long time. Except for the cook, all the staff lived on the premises.

There were grander courtyard houses than Werner’s along the alley. The best was owned by Dr E. T. Nystrom, a wealthy Swedish geologist who knew China’s steel and coal reserves to the nearest ton. When he was in town, he was a fixture at the bar of the Peking Club, but he lived half the year in Sweden with his beautiful wife, who refused to move to Peking.

While he was away, Dr Nystrom rented out a portion of his vast courtyard house to two young Americans, the leftist journalist and author Edgar Snow and his fiery and attractive wife Helen Foster Snow, also a well-known journalist. The Snows were among the most notorious foreigners in Peking, and people either loved them or hated them, particularly Edgar, whose politics were anathema to the Establishment. Others viewed them dismissively as parlour pinks living high on the hog, professed revolutionaries who, thanks to the exchange rate of the mighty American dollar, were able to keep a racehorse at the Paomachang track four miles outside the city. The Snows were as likely to appear in the society pages as on the British Special Branch’s Politically Suspect Persons list.

Werner loved the sprawling Tartar City and would regularly take long, invigorating walks through its hive of narrow
hutong.
This was an area of one-storey shacks, street markets with ramshackle restaurants, open-air butchers and hawkers. Winter in the Tartar City was the time for roasted chestnuts, cooked in braziers that were pungently fuelled by charcoal or animal dung. It was also the season for noodles and spiced bean curd, cut into squares and fried, and for dumplings—good northern fare to keep the cold out. There were bathhouses, fortune-tellers, professional letter writers scribbling for the illiterate, pavement barbers who cut hair before an audience. These barbers knew everything, heard every piece of gossip doing the rounds. Impromptu Peking opera singers, child acrobats and bearded magicians performed on the streets and then passed a hat round the crowd. A few cars fought their way between clusters of rickshaws, and when it rained, the rutted roads were ankle-deep in mud. In a sign of modernity, overhead wires were bringing the first electricity to the Tartar City, but the older residents distrusted these snaking, humming cables.

As a scholar, Werner wanted to observe as much of Peking’s street life and traditions as possible, and being a skilled linguist, he was keen to engage people in conversation. He was also of the belief that a stiff daily walk kept you young. In winter he would wrap up in a long gabardine coat he had used on research expeditions to Mongolia. He attracted attention—an elderly but straight-backed white man, invariably wearing specially made wraparound dark glasses of his own design to protect his eyes from Peking’s dust storms. Werner maintained all his life that these glasses had allowed him to retain his excellent vision.

His usual route took him south from his house, through the teeming collection of
hutong
and across Hatamen and Flower streets, then along Embroidery Street and past the Goldfish Ponds, where scholars came to contemplate amid their tranquility. From there he walked towards the ancient Temple of Heaven, where countless emperors had once come to pray for good harvests.

Occasionally he would wander westwards from his house, along the Tartar Wall to the Hatamen Gate. Here cars and rickshaws had to slow to a crawl to pass through the narrow archway into the Legation Quarter, whose eastern boundary was formed by the gate. The Quarter’s western boundary was marked by another gate—Ch’ienmen, home to Peking’s main railway station—and also by Hubu Street, teeming with restaurants specialising in boiled mutton. In Liulichang, just outside Ch’ienmen, Werner might browse among the old bookstores and curio shops. Or he sometimes wandered to the northern border of the Quarter, which was the grand sweep of Chang’an Avenue and the Forbidden City. The southern boundary was the Tartar Wall.